Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim

First published Wed Feb 15, 2017

The intellectual biography of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486–1535) provides us with significant proof of a
cultural crisis in the Renaissance. The most striking aspect of his
heritage is the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of a comprehensive
treatise on magic and occult arts, De occulta philosophia libri
tres (Three Books on Occult Philosophy), written in
1510, but then reworked, substantially enlarged, and finally published
in 1533, and a rigorous refutation of all products of human reason,
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque
excellentia verbi Dei declamatio invectiva (On the
Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences: An Invective
Declamation), printed in 1530. Esoteric literature and
inquisitorial handbooks invariably quoted Agrippa, the celebrated (or
execrated) Archimagus; bibliographies on skepticism granted
him a long lasting, but not entirely deserved, reputation as one
“who professed to overturn all the science” (Naudé
1644: 44–45). Actually, both works, as well as all of
Agrippa’s other writings, are clearly defined moments in a
broader philosophical, religious, and moral meditation on the social
significance of learning in his own time. The “paradox”
with which Agrippa challenges his readers lies precisely in the
simultaneous presence of two speculative concerns, which are scattered
in different texts, but which express, in spite of their apparent
inconsistency, a complex cultural and religious project. De
vanitate performs the epistemological function of the pars
destruens, identifying the causes and the historical
responsibilities for the general spiritual wreckage of Christian
society, and introducing the proposal contained in the pars
construens. De occulta philosophia, recovering
“true magic” in the framework of Neoplatonic metaphysics
and Hermetic theology, offers humankind a wonder-working knowledge,
one which is able to restore human cognitive and practical
capacities.

In order to understand the internal coherence of Agrippa’s
intellectual journey, his entire oeuvre has to be taken into
account. The task is made more difficult because of his specific
writing strategy, which entailed hiding his true purposes beneath a
mound of borrowed material and erratic juxtapositions. This style of
thought and exposition requires Agrippa’s readers to piece
together his “scattered meaning” (dispersa
intentio) and to search for the theoretical message which is
knowingly concealed within an unsystematic exposition. The literary
technique of spreading knowledge in disguise, typical of the
sapiential tradition, turned out to be increasingly important for most
Renaissance intellectuals, who were “forced to create spaces for
themselves by merging learning with prophecy” (Celenza 2001:
128). In addition, Agrippa composed his texts by gathering a wide
range of concepts and quotations from ancient and contemporary
sources, which were removed from their original context and
re-composed in a new explanatory structure. Such a way of
de-constructing and re-constructing his cultural models should be
considered in the light of Agrippa’s ideological program. By
“re-writing” his sources, he uncovered presuppositions and
implications, which the sources themselves often left unsaid, and he
connected together, in a single coherent design, arguments and points
of view which remained separate in contemporary discussions. In this
way, he added a “political” meaning to the new text which
was not present in the purely cultural or religious critique put
forward by his sources. This emphasis on the civic function of
philosophy can be regarded as the most characteristic and
“original” element in Agrippa’s works.

1. Biography

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born on 14 September 1486 in Cologne.
He matriculated at the University of Cologne in 1499 and graduated in
1502. The degree in medicine which he claimed to have earned was ruled
out by Prost (1882: 67–74), who also raised serious doubts about
his doctorates in Canon and Civil Law (in utroque iure).
Nauert (1965: 10–11), however, suggested that they might have
been obtained during the two periods of his life about which we have
very little information: 1502–1507 and 1511–1518. Agrippa
came into contact with the school of Albertus Magnus at Cologne, where
it was still a living tradition and where he pursed his interest in
natural philosophy, encountering the Historia naturalis
(Natural History) of Pliny the Elder for the first time.
Andreas Canter, the city poet of Cologne, probably introduced him to
Lullism—later, Agrippa wrote a long commentary, printed at
Cologne in 1531, on Lull’s Ars magna (Great
Art). During his youthful studies, Agrippa also established
personal relationships with those German humanists who shared his
interest in ancient wisdom. He spent a short period in Paris, where he
might have been a student. With some French friends, he formed a
sodalitium, a sort of secret circle or initiatory
brotherhood, which, according the collection of letters from and to
Agrippa, included Charles de Bovelles (c. 1479–1533), Symphorien
Champier (c. 1471–1539), Germain de Brie (c. 1489–1538),
Germain de Ganay (d. 1520), the portraitist at the French court Jean
Perréal (c. 1455–1530), and an unknown Italian friend,
Landulfus. Between 1508 and 1509, Agrippa undertook a mysterious
journey to Spain, seemingly engaged in a military mission. In 1509 he
was charged with a course of lectures on Johannes Reuchlin’s
De verbo mirifico (On the Wonder-Working Word) at
the University of Dôle in Burgundy. This academic appointment
had been supported by the chancellor of the university, Archbishop
Antoine de Vergy. In the inaugural lecture, Agrippa pronounced a
prolusion in honor of the daughter of Emperor Maximilian, Margaret of
Austria, Princess of Austria and Burgundy. He planned to develop the
speech into a more comprehensive treatise in praise of womankind,
dedicating it to Margaret. Therefore, he began to draft, but perhaps
did not finish, his celebrated De nobilitate et praecellentia
foeminei sexus declamatio (Declamation on the Nobility and
Pre-Eminence of the Female Sex), which was published only in
1529. Agrippa’s teaching on Christian kabbalah attracted
considerable interest among the members of the university and of the
local Parlement, and he joined the collegium of
theologians. Unfortunately, not everyone had a benevolent attitude to
what sounded like an attempt to spread the “most criminal,
condemned and prohibited art of kabbalah”
(Expostulatio, p. 494) in Christian schools. The Franciscan
Jean Catilinet, the provincial superior for Burgundy, preaching in the
presence of Margaret at the court of Low Countries in Ghent, denounced
Agrippa as a “judaizing heretic” (ibidem). This
charge put an end to Agrippa’s teaching career in Dôle and
dashed his hopes of obtaining Margaret’s favor. Returning to
Germany, in the winter of 1509–1510 Agrippa went to the
monastery of St. Jacob at Würzburg to meet Johannes Trithemius,
Abbot of Sponheim. Over the course of a few intense days, the famous
abbot and his young visitor discussed a topic of mutual interest:
natural magic and its role in contemporary culture. The meeting had a
crucial impact on Agrippa. He quickly finished a compendium
on magic, which he had been working on for some time. The first draft
of De occulta philosophia was dedicated to Trithemius, who
received the manuscript shortly before 8 April 1510 and generously
praised Agrippa’s commitment. The book circulated in manuscript,
as evidence from Agrippa’s correspondence shows; but he
continued to assemble materials in order to revise this first draft.
This aim was achieved only twenty years later.

In London, where he had gone in 1510 to carry out a political and
“very secret assignment” (occultissimum negotium,
Defensio, F. B6), probably on the orders of Emperor
Maximilian, he became familiar with John Colet, who introduced him to
the study of St. Paul’s epistles. Agrippa wrote
Commentariola (Little Commentaries) on the Epistle
to the Romans, which he then lost in Italy and recovered only in 1523,
but which remain totally unknown to us. During his stay in London,
Agrippa replied to Catilinet’s accusations with a polemical
Expostulatio super Expositione sua in librum De verbo mirifico cum
Joanne Catilineti (Expostulation with Jean Catilinet over His
Exposition of the Book On the Wonder-Working Word)—just the
first in a series of countless epic battles between him and
contemporary scholastic theologians. From 1511 to 1518, Agrippa was in
Italy, serving Maximilian, but his military duties did not prevent him
from pursuing his philosophical interests. He lectured on
Plato’s Symposium (Convivium) and on the
Hermetic Pimander (that is, the Corpus Hermeticum)
at the University of Pavia, in 1512 and 1515 respectively. He probably
believed that he might be able to achieve his academic ambitions
there, but his fervent expectations were soon disappointed. After the
defeat of the Swiss and Imperial troops at Marignano (13–14
September 1515), he was forced to quit teaching and to abandon Pavia.
He then sought patronage at the court of William IX Paleologus,
Marquis of Monferrato, to whom he promptly dedicated two little works,
De homine (On Humankind) and De triplici ratione
cognoscendi Deum (On the Threefold Way of Knowing God),
gathering together some notes and materials he had already organized
or perhaps even prepared for press, in Pavia. Both works attest to the
importance of Agrippa’s contact with early sixteenth-century
Italian culture. During his stay in Italy, he joined a network of
friends and correspondents, who allowed him to deepen his knowledge of
Neoplatonic and Hermetic literature, to sharpen his acquaintance with
kabbalistic texts, and to broaden and update his bibliographical
information. For a time he was in Turin, where he lectured on
theological topics.

In the following years, Agrippa was in Metz (1518–1520), as the
city orator and advocate (advocatus), in Geneva
(1521–1523), where he practiced medicine, and, finally in
Freiburg (until 1524), as the city physician. Throughout this period,
he came into contact with a number of humanists who were engaging with
the new religious ideas circulating at the time. Therefore, his
reputation as an “occult philosopher” assumed more complex
aspects. His De originali peccato declamatio (Declamation
on Original Sin), written in 1518 but not printed until 1529,
puzzled the dedicatee, Dietrich Wichwael, Bishop of Cyrene, and
Agrippa’s friend Claude Dieudonné with regard to his
interpretation of Adam’s sin as consisting in the sexual act. In
Metz, he was involved in the debate on St. Anne’s triple
marriage, expressing his passionate support for Jacques Lefèvre
d’Étaples’ criticism of the popular legend that
attributed three husbands and three daughters to her. In De
Beatissimae Annae monogamia ac unico puerperio (On St.
Anne’s Monogamy and Sole Childbirth, printed in Cologne,
1534), he gave a fierce reply to the accusations of heresy leveled at
Lefèvre (and at himself) by three conservative monks. The
defense was vehement and strongly sarcastic: no wonder Lefèvre
d’Étaples reacted anxiously to Agrippa’s promise to
become his ally. Meanwhile, Agrippa had successfully defended a woman
of Woippy who was accused of being a witch, saving her from the stake.
Thanks to these courageous positions and his intense relationships
with pre-Reform circles, Agrippa was gradually assuming a by no means
secondary role in the general movement against the scholastic
tradition. He won the esteem of many scholars (some of them would
later on join the Reformation), but, at the same time, attracted the
particular attention of the religious authorities.

In spring of 1524 Agrippa moved to Lyon to take up the office of
physician to the French king’s mother, Louise of Savoy. He tried
to win the favor of the king’s sister, Marguerite
d’Alençon, by dedicating to her his declamation De
sacramento matrimonii (On the Sacrament of Marriage,
1526) in parallel Latin and French versions. Unfortunately, it was a
blunder and a terrible failure. The princess (who had recently been
widowed) was already hostile to the Erasmian ‘spirit’,
which Agrippa referred to in order to claim the lawfulness and benefit
of second marriages. Furthermore, ecclesiastical authorities were able
to recognize the influence of some Erasmus’ condemned works on
Agrippa’s positive attitude towards marriage, as well as the
link which connected it to the treatise De sacro coniugio
(On Holy Wedlock) of the Franciscan François Lambert,
who had fled to Strasbourg after joining the Reformation.
Agrippa’s position at court was becoming worse. His friendships,
his sympathies for the work of humanist Reformers, his more and more
aggressive theses—in 1526 he reworked an earlier oration or
letter, Dehortatio gentilis theologiae (Dissuasion from
Pagan Theology), in which he criticized contemporaries for their
excessive curiosity about Hermetic theology and their disregard for
Christian education—were raising doubts his religious orthodoxy.
His correspondence with the Duke of Bourbon, who had betrayed the
French Crown in order to side with the Emperor, called into question
his political loyalties, and he was suspected of involvement in a
plot. His refusal to furnish an astrological prognostication for
François I and his incautious remarks about Louise’s
superstition, which a friend passed on to her, sparked off her open
hostility. Agrippa was stripped of his pension and forbidden to leave
France. In the midst of such dramatic misadventures, he wrote his
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum. It was a biting
commentary on all human sciences and arts and a fierce attack on the
moral and social assumptions of his day. Agrippa subjected the work to
later revisions and enlargements, right up to the moment of
publication, in 1530.

When, at last, he was allowed to leave France, Agrippa accepted the
office of archivist and imperial historiographer at the court of
Margaret of Austria, governor of the Low Countries, in Antwerp. He
finally dedicated himself to publishing his writings. In 1529 a
collection of his short treatises was printed in Antwerp by Michael
Hillenius, and in 1530 another Antwerp printer, Johannes Graphaeus,
brought out De vanitate. In 1531, Graphaeus also printed the
enlarged version of Book I of De occulta philosophia,
dedicated to Hermann von Wied, Archbishop Elector of Cologne
(1477–1552), and the table of contents for Book II and III. Both
De vanitate and De occulta philosophia circulated
widely, thanks to further editions (in Antwerp, Cologne, and Paris),
and once more Agrippa found himself in trouble with the religious
authorities. The Louvain theologians, questioned by Margaret of
Austria herself, condemned De vanitate as scandalous, impious
and heretical, and so did the Sorbonne with respect to the Paris
edition. The Parlement at Mechelin was informed of the
Louvain professors’ judgment, and required Agrippa to answer
their accusations. He replied with two fearless writings, refuting,
point by point, the criticisms in his Apologia
(Defense) and accusing, in turn, his opponents of ignorance
and bad faith in his Querela (Complaint). These
events obviously put an end to Agrippa’s career at
Margaret’s court, and he was once again seeking a new protector.
Hermann von Wied, who was both interested in occult sciences and
sympathized with moderate religious reform, offered him protection
and, in June 1532, brought him into his own household. Eventually,
Agrippa was able to deliver the complete, final version of De
occulta philosophia to the Cologne printer Johannes Soter, who in
November was already typesetting it. Shortly before Christmas,
however, the Dominican inquisitor Conrad Köllin denounced the
book as heretical and blasphemous, getting the city’s Senate to
suspend the printing. Agrippa’s impassioned and controversial
appeal to the Cologne Senate (Zika 2003: 99–124) did not succeed
in resolving the impasse. It was, instead, the forceful intervention
of Hermann which enabled De occulta philosophia to appear,
even though accompanied by an appendix including the chapters of
De vanitate which criticized magic.

We are not informed about the last years of Agrippa’s life,
because his correspondence stops in July 1533. He was perhaps the
author of a self-defense, Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum et
ruina Christianae religionis (Dialogue on the Vanity of the
Sciences and the Ruin of Christian Religion), fictitiously
attributed to Godoschalcus Moncordius, an otherwise unknown Cistercian
monk, and printed, in all probability, by Johannes Soter in 1534
(Zambelli 1965: 220–23). On 22 February 1534, from Bonn, Agrippa
addressed a legal memorandum to the Parliament of the Low Countries
(Zambelli 1965: 305–12). According to his pupil Johannes Wier
(1515–1565), Agrippa was in Bonn until 1535. He then returned to
France, where he was arrested on the order of François I.
Shortly after his release, he died in Grenoble in 1535 or, at the
latest, in 1536.

2. De occulta philosophia (early draft)

Dedicating to Trithemius his first attempt as a reformer of magic,
Agrippa claimed to share the common desire for the renewal of a
“sublime and sacred science”, perverted by having been
detached from its theoretical context and by being practiced with
anti-natural means and intentions. Corrupted texts and inadequate
critical and philosophical awareness had made magic a convoluted
jumble of errors and obscurities, despised by the learned, mistrusted
by the Church, and used with feckless irresponsibility by
superstitious old witches. Instead, in its original and pure form,
magic was a sacred body of knowledge, providing the possibility of
human dominion over all of created nature (elemental, celestial, and
intellectual).

Basically, the first draft of De occulta philosophia was
structured as a survey, which owed much to Marsilio Ficino’s
De vita (On Life), Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola’s Oratio (de dignitate hominis,
Oration [on the Dignity of Humankind]), and Johannes
Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico. These authors had already
endeavored to restore magic, distinguishing (from different
perspectives and with different aims) between true and false magic,
between philosophy and pseudo-philosophy, between the sacred and the
sacrilegious. Agrippa’s program followed a slightly different
path. For Giovanni Pico, magic was “the most perfect
accomplishment of natural philosophy” (Oration, p.
226). Instead, for Agrippa, it was “the most perfect
accomplishment of the noblest philosophy” (totius
nobilissimae philosophiae absoluta consummatio, I, 2, p. 86).
This definition had significant implications. Unlike his predecessors,
Agrippa conceived of magic as a comprehensive knowledge, gathering
together all the cognitive data collected in the various fields of
human learning, and making explicit their potentials for acting on
reality. Therefore, according to the three different levels of being,
there were three different operative areas to which magic applied,
making it possible to distinguish three ‘forms’ of magic:
natural magic, astrological (and numerological) magic, and
‘religious’ or ‘ceremonial’ magic, that is,
the kabbalistic and theurgic magic. All three forms are true and good,
if properly practiced in the context of the reformed magic. This
assessment highlighted that Agrippa had moved away from another of his
sources. In De verbo mirifico, Johannes Reuchlin had proposed
a similar tripartite division in the “wonder-working art”
(ars miraculorum), but he had also recognized the intrinsic
risks of each “form”. Magic based on physics (natural
magic) cannot be checked and is therefore limited in its powers. Magic
based on astrology is often false and confused. As far as ceremonial
magic is concerned, goetia, which relies on malign demons, is
clearly superstitious; theurgy, which attempts to establish contact
with benign demons, is practicable in theory, but complicated and
dangerous in practice. Therefore, Reuchlin favored a more reliable and
efficacious alternative, a fourth way, called the “art of
soliloquy” (ars soliloquia), based on the use of the
holy name of Christ. While sharing Reuchlin’s enthusiasm for
this thaumaturgic philosophy, Agrippa’s view was broader, also
embracing Ficino’s astrological magic, Pico’s natural
magic, and Neoplatonic and Hermetic theurgic magic. The
all-inclusiveness of his “restored” magic also allowed him
to recover the legacy of the medieval tradition (of Albertus Magnus,
above all) and even to pay some attention to popular
beliefs—justifying them within a Neoplatonic conceptual
framework.

In Book I Agrippa explores the elemental world, reviewing the manifest
and occult virtues of stones, plants, animals, and human individuals.
Occult virtues, on which natural magic mainly focuses, are explained
by the relationship of causal correspondence, connecting the eternal
exemplars, the ideas, to the sublunary forms through the stars. In his
Neoplatonic animated cosmos, all things are harmoniously related to
each other. Magical activity consists chiefly in attracting the
“spirit of the world” (spiritus mundi). It is
diffused everywhere and distributes life to everything, acting as the
mediator between heavenly souls and earthly bodies, and allowing a
sympathetic exchange between the different levels of the ontological
hierarchy.

Book II, dedicated to astrology, opens with the celebrated image of
the magus as the go-between who subjects sublunary world to the stars.
The knowledge of the laws, governing how the celestial influences flow
down to the earth, enables the magus to collaborate actively with
nature, modifying the phenomenal processes. To describe astrological
images, attracting astral virtues, Agrippa pillaged the technical
details described by Ficino in De vita coelitus comparanda
(On Obtaining Life from the Heavens), but he also went back
to the medieval tradition.

In Book III, Agrippa commits the physical and celestial worlds to the
protection of religion, which has the task of guaranteeing a
rigorously non-superstitious magic, immune to demonic deceptions.
Religion provides the magus with a model of moral improvement,
allowing him to realize the Hermetic ideal of the perfect philosopher,
perfect magus, and perfect “priest” (sacerdos).
In describing the human path to Hermetic deification, the first draft
of Book III makes a clear distinction between faith and science.
Agrippa draws on Reuchlin to define the link between illumination,
offered by God to the human mind through faith, and reason, which can
gain true knowledge only by receiving it from the mind. Reason, after
attaining the innate contents of the mind, produces a science which is
legitimized by its divine origins and is therefore not susceptible to
the assault of doubts and errors. This was only an initial (and
somewhat vague) approach to a topic which would play an increasingly
crucial role in Agrippa’s thought. At this time, the primacy of
faith, as expressed by Reuchlin, functioned chiefly as the basis for a
powerful and reliable operative practice. As far as kabbalistic magic
was concerned, Agrippa seemingly played down Reuchlin’s raptures
about the Hebrew language, assimilating the sacred Hebrew names,
instituted by God as the vehicles of his power, to the so-called
“strange” or “foreign words” (barbara
verba) of ancient theology and Neoplatonic theurgy.

The early version of De occulta philosophia was, in many
respects, an original attempt. Nevertheless, it did not perfectly
succeed in organizing Agrippa’s different and varying sources
into a coherent structure—especially as regards Book III, which
played a pivotal role in connecting magic to the religious foundation
of learning. Not without reason, the dedicatee Trithemius noticed
these limitations, urging his pupil “not to imitate bullocks,
but to emulate birds” (Epistolae, pp.
503-04)—that is, to turn his mind to the metaphysical Unity as a
prior requirement for all magic activity.

3. De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum

The key to understanding the internal coherence of Agrippa’s
thought is to be found in his deepening interest in Neoplatonic and
Hermetic writings, which allowed him to define the relationship
between faith and reason in a more comprehensive perspective. In the
Plotinian (and Ficinian) theory of the tripartite division of
psychological faculties (mens, ratio,
idolum), mind (mens) represents the highest
function, the head (caput) of the soul, the divine spark
present in every human being; when God creates each soul, it is into
this supreme portion that he infuses the innate ideas, which mind
directly intuits in God. Reason (ratio) is an intermediate
function between the mind, which continually communicates with God,
and the lower powers (idolum, that is, the sensory
faculties), which are connected to the material world. Reason, the
seat of the will, is free to conform to either of the contrasting
directions indicated to it by the other parts of the soul.

This more structured view was already capitalized in the short
treatise De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum (On the
Threefold Way of Knowing God), dedicated to William Paleologus in
1516, but published only in 1529, in a version somewhat expanded by
Agrippa before printing. The term ratio had many meanings for
Agrippa. Firstly, it recounted the ‘way’ of divine
revelation. To manifest himself to mankind, God wrote three books, by
which the three different religious cultures were able to know him.
Ancient philosophers, reading the book of nature, knew God through the
created world; Hebrew theologians, reading the book of the law, knew
God through the angels and the prophets; Christians, reading the book
of the Gospel, gained perfect knowledge of God through his son, made
man. Secondly, ratio referred to the three
“steps” (gradus) in the spiritual ascent of every
human soul to God: sense perception, rational knowledge, and spiritual
knowledge. Finally, like the scholastics, Agrippa intended
ratio as the epistemological criterion by which philosophical
schools performed their theological investigations and reached their
understanding of God’s essence.

Agrippa projected the history of the individual soul and of philosophy
back into the time preceding human history: Adam’s sin is the
archetypal figure of the moral choices and intellectual options of his
descendants. Adam willingly renounced true knowledge when he, trusting
more in Eve than in God, presumed that he could achieve a knowledge
capable of making him equal to God. Similarly, each of us renews the
original sin committed by Adam when our reason denies that it is
created and proudly proclaims an autonomy of its own, shattering its
harmonious relationship with God. Once the hierarchy of cognition has
been destabilized, reason strives to find its contents in the senses,
which are fallacious and deceptive, and builds up a science which is
both dubious and vain: devoid of foundation, inert, and morally
pernicious. Original sin is also repeated in the schools of
contemporary theologians, who try to know God by the wretched means of
their rebellious reason. This is the science of those, who live
“in the realm of the flesh” (Romans 8:9)—the science
of the “sophists of God” (theosophistae):
fatuous, arrogant, quarrelsome and immoral, unable of transforming
their notions into actions, that is, of solving the crisis of which
they are both authors and victims. Contemporary culture, as the fruit
of this rebellious reason (which is, after all, Aristotelian and
scholastic reason), is fated only to describe, to lightly touch on the
structure of reality, without being able to penetrate it.

Agrippa was not professing any form of anti-intellectualism, but he
was applying the Platonic (broadly speaking) model of the tripartite
soul to the Christian way of knowledge. In accordance with this
pattern, if reason respects its subordination to the mind, that is, to
the message, which God has implanted directly in the soul, it fulfils
the role which has been assigned to it in the project of creation,
which is to know God by means of the book of nature. On the other
hand, since the book of nature is written by the hand of God, the
fundamental goodness of the world is implied; and it is also implied
that human beings have the ability to read these pages and are,
indeed, obliged to do so. Reason is therefore perfectly literate and
legitimate when it comes to deciphering this bundle of communicative
signs. Nonetheless, the book of nature is a means through which God
helps us to return to our origin. Therefore, the reading should be
done with our eyes fixed more on the author of the book than on its
contents: the knowledge of physical reality is merely a way of
retracing through sensible objects the cosmic process of love, which
is centered on the eternal Good, “beginning, middle and
end” of everything which exists. Humanity’s greatness
resides purely and simply in its capacity to grasp God by
contemplating his works, the created symbols which bear witness to
their creator. Moreover, when reason “silences” the
sensory part of the soul and turns itself inwards to its highest
function, it becomes conscious of the constant illumination of the
mind by God. At that moment, reason grasps essences by an intuitive
act which is superior to the purely rational one, insofar as it is a
“contact of the essence with God”. This is not a mystical
experience. It is an intellectual experience, founded on some
intuitive philosophical certainties, which revelation proves true.
Faith (fides) does not provide new contents, but unveils the
deep sense of the existing contents of the reason, which is operating
in harmony with the mind. A truly Christian philosopher, however,
cannot be satisfied with having achieved individual knowledge. The
commandment to love our neighbor requires us to become “leaders
of the blind” (Matthew 15:14), “a corrector of the
foolish” and “a teacher of the immature” (Romans
2:20). Contemporary “bad shepherds” (pupils of “the
school of Satan”, as the only preserved manuscript of De
triplici ratione called them) neglect their spiritual
responsibilities. Therefore, the “new” Christian
philosopher has to turn into theologian, teaching the path to general
redemption to his brothers in Christ. In addition, he has to take care
of the social benefits deriving from his knowledge. Agrippa slightly,
but significantly, modified the most celebrated sentence of the
Hermetic Asclepius: “A human, Asclepius, is a great
miracle!”) by stating: “A Christian human is a great
miracle!” (Magnum miraculum est homo Christianus!, p.
146).

The allegorical interpretation of the original sin which Agrippa
borrowed from Paulus Ricius’ Isagoge
(Introduction) was repeated two years later in his De
originali peccato (On Original Sin), written in 1518,
but published in 1529. Adam is faith, the foundation of reason. The
Tree of Life, that is, the privilege of knowing and contemplating God,
was reserved to him. Eve is reason, which was allowed to have a
relationship with the snake, that is, with material things and the
senses. Unlike Adam, she was not forbidden to eat from the Tree of
Knowledge, that is, to know the physical world. Our ancestors were
equally responsible for original sin, but in different ways:
Eve/reason, because she placed trust and hope in the senses and
weakened faith’s firmness with her arguments; Adam/faith,
because he, wishing to indulge his woman, turned away from God to the
sensory world, relying entirely on the conclusions which reason drew
from senses. Agrippa did not generally censure the potential of
reason, but emphasized the hierarchical link between faith and reason.
We are not allowed to debate de divinis (“about divine
matters”), in which we must only have faith and hope. Instead,
we can speculate about created beings, but not have faith and hope in
them.

The allegory was also invoked in his famous eulogy of women, De
nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (On the Nobility
and Superiority of the Feminine Sex), by which Agrippa hoped to
ingratiate himself with Margaret of Austria. Among all the topics
which he meticulously collected from the rich repository of this
literary genre, he also proposed a more philosophical argument in
favor of women, analyzing Eve’s role in original sin. It was
Adam, who introduced spiritual death into the world, since Eve was not
prohibited from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: thus, she
was not guilty of disobeying God. Agrippa did not claim that Eve was
completely without sin. More modestly, he maintained that her sin did
not entail transgressing God’s commandment; she sinned
nevertheless because she allowed the snake to tempt her and became the
occasion of Adam’s sin. She was deceived and went
astray—not “involuntarily” (Van der Poel 1997: 210),
but “ignorantly”. What should we understand by
“ignorantly”? Agrippa could not seriously regard
Eve’s ignorance as a defect in her spiritual progress (as
Augustine did in his The Literal Meaning of Genesis) or as a
weakness of her spiritual faculties (as Isotta Nogarola did in her
Dialogue on Adam and Eve). In the opening of the treatise,
Agrippa, recalling humankind’s creation (Genesis 1:26–7),
underlined that both Adam and Eve had been created in God’s
image and likeness: as rational souls, both shared the same
psychological faculties, the same teleology, and the same moral
freedom. The seeming inconsistency can be resolved by interpreting the
biblical progenitors as “figures” of Neoplatonic
psychology. Reason’s ignorantia Dei (“ignorance
of God”) is not a passive “not-knowing” (which is,
in any case, unthinkable, because God is not concealed in unfathomable
transcendence, but “shines everywhere” in nature, and,
above all, inside humans). On the contrary, reason’s
ignorantia Dei is an active “neglecting”, a will
to turn away from God and a pride in being an end in itself.

4. De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum

It is not possible to establish the extent to which the declamatio
invectiva which Agrippa announced to his friend Jean Chapelain in
September 1526 was really finished at that time. We do know, however,
that when Johannes Grapheus published it in 1530, some parts at least
had been expanded and reworked, according to Agrippa’s custom
(Nauert 1965: 108, n. 11; Zambelli 1992: 81, n. 40). The work was
reprinted many times and was also translated into German (1534),
Italian (1543), English (1569), French (1582), and Dutch (1651).

Richard Popkin underlined that Agrippa’s declamation does not
contain the “serious epistemological analysis” one would
expect from a skeptical debate and suggested that it should be
considered as an expression of anti-intellectualism and biblical
fundamentalism (Popkin 2003: 29). This reading, however, leaves the
key question unresolved: such an anti-intellectualism or biblical
fundamentalism is difficult to reconcile with Agrippa’s
long-standing interest in precisely those sciences which by then
should have been swept away by the appeal to verbum Dei
(“word of God”). It is undeniably true that in De
vanitate the moral angle prevails over the epistemological
critique. This is because Agrippa also looked at trades, professions,
pastimes, and social types, none of which were susceptible to
epistemological analysis. Moreover, when discussing a science, he was
primarily interested in focusing on how it was used and on its
concrete effects on society, rather than in investigating its methods
and subjects. Some scholars have identified De vanitate as
the result of a profound personal crisis (psychological, religious, or
cultural), which led Agrippa to a radical criticism of the system of
occult doctrines and of his own intellectual choices. No doubt, the
circumstances of his life between 1526 and 1530 influenced the tone of
the work which he was preparing, accentuating its harshness and
inspiring some of its more polemical and audacious pages. Nonetheless,
it is unlikely that, all of the sudden, Agrippa abandoned his
philosophical convictions, solely because of indignation at the
treatment he suffered at the court of Louise of Savoy (Weeks 1993:
120–24). Likewise, the hypothesis of an intellectual upheaval
(Keefer 1988: 614–53; Zambelli 2000: 41) remains merely
conjectural. Agrippa’s supposed disbelief in science (and, above
all, in astrology and magic) contrasts with his continuing work on
De occulta philosophia and with his project for a reform of
the magical tradition, based on a new vision of science. It is
important to recognize that there were serious motivations behind his
fierce attack on the foundations of knowledge. Bowen (1972:
249–56) and Korkowski (1976: 594–607), reducing De
vanitate to a simple exercise of rhetoric in the fashionable
literary genre of the paradox, correctly outlined the work’s
formal characteristics; however, they did not sufficiently take into
account its philosophical intentions and turned its subversive
implications into something quite inoffensive. De vanitate
proposed a reform project, one which was broader, more complex, and
more radical than that of its model, Erasmus’ Praise of
Folly (Laus stultitiae).

Agrippa’s aim was to pass judgment on the condition, methods,
and practitioners of the philosophical and theological schools which
dominated his time. His verdict is undoubtedly very severe. He
believed that contemporary culture, lost in useless sophisms, was no
longer able to fulfill its task of educating Christian people and
promoting their spiritual well-being. The social fabric had become
torn by corruption, by political and religious struggles, and by
heresies and superstitions. He did not, however, intend De
vanitate to be merely destructive. His aim was also to propose a
cultural alternative, delineating a different philosophical approach,
capable of forming a new intellectual élite, who would be
seriously interested in the moral and religious progress of human
community.

Certainly, the most striking aspect of the declamatio is its
critical stance. The all-encompassing polemical parade emphasizes that
human “inventions” (inventiones)—grammar as
well as dance, theology as well as hunting, ethics as well as dice
games—are nothing more than opinions, devoid of coherence and
stability, and irreparably harmful to support the spiritual health of
believers. The discord which divides practitioners of each branch of
science attests to the intrinsic weakness of the findings of natural
reason, which proceeds by conjectures, subject to refutation.
Everything reason devises and carries out, relying on its own strength
alone, is fallacious, useless, and damaging: “the structure of
the sciences is so risky and unstable that it is much safer not to
know anything than to have knowledge” (1, p. 5). The happiest
life is the life of the ignorant.

The usual compilation of discordant opinions of philosophers was
partly shaped by texts of the ancient skeptics; but for the most part
Agrippa made use of more recent sources: Ficino, Reuchlin, and
Francesco Giorgio Veneto. There are no quotations from Gianfrancesco
Pico’s Examen vanitatis doctrinae gentium, the first
detailed reading of the work of Sextus Empiricus (Schmitt 1967:
237–42). This significant omission suggests that Agrippa did not
agree with the skeptical fideism expressed by Gianfrancesco. De
vanitate did not, in fact, question the human ability to know
causes. Rather, it questioned the capacity of Aristotelian
epistemology to account for the nature of things. In chapter 7,
Agrippa states that knowledge based on sense perception is not able to
guarantee a sure and truthful experience, since the senses are
fallible; nor does it succeed in revealing the causes and properties
of phenomena or in knowing what is only intelligible, since this
escapes the grasp of the senses. Not all human knowledge was open to
question, however. Instead, Agrippa, by proving that a sense-based
theory of knowledge cannot produce science, intended to introduce
another epistemology, one which he regarded as the foundation for true
knowledge. So, in chapter 52, “On the Soul”, he did not
uphold even the façade of skepticism. “Demonic
Aristotle” (daemoniacus Aristoteles) made the soul
dependent on the nature of the body, defining it as “the first
perfection of a natural body possessing organs, which potentially has
life” (Aristotle, De anima II.1). “Divine
Plato” (divinus ille Plato) aligned himself with those
philosophers (Zoroaster, Hermes, and Orpheus) who had defined the soul
as a divine substance: the “product of an incorporeal
maker” and dependent “solely on the power of its efficient
cause, not on the bowels of matter” (52, pp. 109-10). Agrippa
noted the disagreement between Aristotle and Plato on this subject,
not in order to lead his readers to a skeptical “suspension of
judgment” (epoché). Rather, he intentionally
contrasted two different models of rationality, explicitly weighing up
their value. At least on this matter, the “ancient
theology” (prisca theologia) and the Platonic school
were found to be consistent with the criterion of truth, the Holy
Scriptures.

The real intentions of De vanitate have to be extracted from
deep inside the text, hidden beneath more polemical and provocative
statements. The sciences of their own accord “do not procure for
us any divine felicity which transcends the capacity of man, except
perhaps that felicity which the serpent promised to our
ancestors”; but in itself “every science is both bad and
good” and deserves whatever praise “it can derive from the
probity of its possessor” (1, p. 21). Agrippa appropriated here
the Aristotelian principle of the ethical neutrality of science: it is
the spiritual attitude of the knower, his “integrity”
(probitas), which constitutes the moral criterion of the
discipline and ensures good or bad usage. From the cultural point of
view, the destructive action of skepticism puts an end to the
discussion between the schools by eliminating one of the two
contenders, that is, all philosophers whose doctrines are built on the
foundation of sensory experience. From the pedagogical point of view,
however, skepticism is no more than a preliminary training. Systematic
debate about sensory representations and the suspension of judgment
concerning the appearances of the material world free the soul from
false opinions, demonstrating the inadequacy of empiricism and
directing the search for truth towards the intelligible.

Purification leads to a new spiritual attitude, which makes the
philosopher capable of undertaking the route to true knowledge. Truth,
in fact, is grasped only by turning inwards, to the mind, where God
implanted the innate ideas when he created the soul. Agrippa’s
acceptance of the Neoplatonic theory of knowledge is positively
expressed in the final peroration of De vanitate, when he
invites his readers to abandon the schools of the sophists in order to
regain awareness of the cognitive inheritance to which every soul has
an original entitlement. Agrippa refers to the Academics alongside
Holy Scripture to support the idea that human beings have an innate
realm of knowledge, which needs to be recovered by means of a suitable
paideia, or program of education. The return to original
perfection is an ‘illumination’—not a mystical
illumination, but an intellectual one: the reminiscence and
re-appropriation of self-knowledge. Ultimately, illumination is the
knowledge of the self as “mind” (mens) or
“intellect” (intellectus).

In this sense, Agrippa defines faith as the “foundation of
reason” (fundamentum rationis), that is, the criterion,
guarantee, and firm basis of human knowledge. Revelation is without
doubt the absolute and complete expression of truth; but it originates
from the same source as the contents of the mind, on which the
activity of reason is dependent. Since God is the sole source of
truth, the tradition of faith is homogeneous with philosophical
contemplation, which finds its justification in revelation. Through
divine will, rationality and its higher level of “spiritual
intelligence” are able to establish a relationship of
continuity. For this reason, rational science and all its practical
applications gain authenticity and legitimacy if they develop within a
theological framework. This does not mean that reason has to draw its
contents directly from Scripture. Rather, it means that the contents
of science, procured by the exercise of reason, are “true”
when they do not contradict divine design, do not hinder the spiritual
progress of the Christian, and contribute to the good of humanity and
the world. Certainly, the architect will not seek technical
instructions for how to put up his building in the Bible. Instead, he
and those who commission him need to seek in it an indication of the
“manner” (modus) and “end”
(finis) of this discipline. Architecture would be an art and
science “extraordinarily necessary and beautiful” in
itself and capable of making a large contribution to the well-being of
the civil community, if humankind had not rendered it vain and noxious
by their excessive use of it “for the simple exhibition of the
riches” and by heedlessly destroying the natural
surroundings.

In De vanitate, Agrippa does not put faith in opposition to
science or the Holy Scriptures in opposition to human books. He
instead puts Aristotelian philosophy, worldly science and the source
of unbelief in opposition to “Platonic” philosophy, the
model of a Christian “science in the word of God”
(scientia in verbo Dei). With this expression, Agrippa refers
to a religiously orientated science: a science which can move freely
in the sphere of the “visible manifestations of God”
(visibilia Dei) in order to know his “invisible
essentials” (invisibilia) and to trace the beginning
and origin of everything. He does this in the awareness of the harmony
between faith and reason, which scholastic Aristotelian philosophy had
disowned, infecting the world with a plague of “petty
syllogisms” (ratiunculae), sophisms, and impertinent
questions about God. There is, in sum, a ‘divine’ path to
knowledge, which Plato and the ancient theologians founded on God and
which deals with God. And there is a “demonic” path, which
Aristotle constituted merely on human abilities and which deals with
lower things: it is demonic, because it renews and perpetuates the sin
of Adam, inspired by Satan and his proud ambition to make himself
equal to the creator in the knowledge of good and evil.

Agrippa’s distinction between different forms of
rationality—valued differently according to their basis and
their final point of view—allows us to regard his declamatio
invectiva as not belonging to a true and proper profession of
skepticism, of general anti-intellectualism, or of rigorous fideism.
Instead, it can be realigned with the anti-Aristotelian and
anti-scholastic critiques of Ficino, Reuchlin, and Giorgio. Agrippa
did not propose abandonment in God in the undifferentiated
indifference of “neither this one nor that one” advocated
by Sextus Empiricus. In his view, skepticism constituted an exercise
in education, necessary for pointing the way towards the apprehension
of truth. In the final digression, “In Praise of the Ass”,
Agrippa seemingly invites his readers to put down the baggage of the
human sciences and return to being “naked and simple
asses”, and thus newly capable of carrying on their own backs
the mysteries of divine wisdom, like the ass which carried Jesus into
Jerusalem. This ironic exhortation is polemical: those who must be
subjected to metamorphosis into an ass are the “noble doctors in
sciences”, professing a purely human (or rather, demonic)
science. For scholastic theologians, the motto “To know nothing
is the happiest life” (nihil scire foelicissima vita)
is valid, since “there is nothing more fatal than a science
stuffed with impiety” (1, p. 4). Philosophy should be a
religious progress—or, rather, a regressus, a return to
the source of being.

5. De occulta philosophia (final draft)

In De vanitate, Agrippa did not make any explicit recantation
of his passion for occult sciences (Keefer 1988: 618); he simply
admitted that there might have been something wrong in his juvenile
work on magic, because of his adolescent curiosity. In fact, the
renewal of magic continued to be a central feature of his intellectual
journey. Between 1530 and 1533, right in the middle of his violent
battle against theologians and conservatives, he was preparing De
occulta philosophia for publication, entrusting his last hope of
a secure financial support to the same work to which he had committed
his desire for fame and fortune twenty years earlier. Although in the
meantime his religious concerns had deepened, he did not perceive any
conflict between his involvement in theological debates and his
persistent interest in the task of rebuilding magic. In his mind, they
were two coherent aspects of a single project, as he had already
pointed out in De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. There
Agrippa had made clear that reforming culture on the basis of the
solid certainty of God’s illumination also implied regaining
humankind’s original perfection and thaumaturgic ability, which
Adam owned by right before he sinned.

Comparison of the 1510 dedication copy, sent by Agrippa to Trithemius
(MS Würzburg, M.ch.q.50), with the printed final edition (Cologne
1533), reveals the careful and thorough revision and enlargement to
which the first draft was subjected. The book doubled in length, and
fresh ideas and references were included. In updating the text,
Agrippa mostly drew on works consistent with the sources he had
already used in drafting the initial version. Between 1510 and 1533,
he had studied a number of texts which he had previously been unaware
of or neglected (Ficino’s commentaries on Plato and on Plotinus;
Giovanni Pico’s Conclusiones, Heptaplus, and
Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem; Lodovico
Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis; and Gianfrancesco
Pico’s De rerum praenotione) or which had been
published in the meantime (some of Erasmus’ writings; Paulus
Ricius’ commentaries on Hebrew writings; Reuchlin’s De
arte cabalistica; and Francesco Giorgio’s De harmonia
mundi). Agrippa’s vast exploration of books allowed him to
re-orient his youthful project, providing a definitive justification
of his aim to restore in full the religious, cognitive, and practical
scope of ancient magic. This “reformed magic” (magia
reformata) would not only guarantee to the magus mastery over
nature and the ability to attract astral and angelic virtues, but
would also assure his ascent to the First Principle.

The revised version of De occulta philosophia offers
extensive proof of this significant qualitative shift. The original
tripartite structure was given a new metaphysical structure, which
powerfully underlined the idea of the cosmos as an epiphany of the
divine. Thanks to the influence of Giorgio’s De harmonia
mundi, Agrippa was able to adopt a radically new approach to
natural magic. Now, Book I explicitly contemplates the material world
as the receptacle of divine and presents the occult virtues as an
example of the living links connecting the terrestrial forms to the
First Cause through the chain of the higher intermediaries (stars and
spiritual essences). The “perfection of both science and
practice” is guaranteed by the ability to change the impure back
to the pure, and plurality back to simplicity. In significant
additions “on the properties of elements” (chapters
3–6), William Newman (1982) recognized the description of the
alchemical reduction of elemental earth to the purity of first matter.
There are three orders of elements, corresponding to the three levels
of being: pure elements, unmixed and incorruptible; compound elements,
multiplex, varied and impure, but which can be reduced to “pure
simplicity” (pura simplicitas); lastly, decomposed
elements, convertible into one another. Earth, which confers solidity
on other elements, mixing with them but without changing into them, is
the receptacle of every celestial influence, because it is
continuously animated by the virtues conveyed by the
spiritus: so, earth is “the foundation and mother of
everything”, because it encloses the seminal virtues of all
creation. Therefore, having undergone the process of purification and
simplification, it becomes “the purest remedy for restoring and
preserving us”. The process of universal simplification of the
elements can be carried out by reducing earth to the original purity
of the first matter. Newman explained the nature of this process,
referring to chapter 4 of Book II, on the power of the number one.
Here, Agrippa traces the presence of unity in all levels of existence:
God in the archetypal world, the anima mundi in the
intellectual one, the Sun in the heavenly world, the heart in man, and
Lucifer in hell. In the elemental world, the one is the
philosopher’s stone, “embodying all wonders”,
without which “neither alchemy, nor natural magic may attain
their perfect end”. Agrippa’s source, as Newman has
pointed out, was a letter in which Trithemius gave a cosmological
interpretation of the Hermetic text “Emerald Tablet”
(Tabula Smaragdina), identifying the alchemical opus
as the universal “path to the highest unity”
(Epistolae, pp. 471-73).

Book II introduces a massive quantity of “technical”
references, in some part influenced by the corpus of magical
manuscripts which had belonged to Trithemius and which came into
Agrippa’s possession in 1520. This updating, however, depended
for the most part on epistolary exchanges of texts and ideas with his
correspondents. Despite his violent attack on the divinatory arts in
De vanitate, he presented here a more comprehensive treatment
of astrology. After all, magic (although “reformed”) could
not dispense with astrology. Occult virtues can be explained only in
terms of the heavenly qualities conveyed by the rays which emanate
from stars. It is each individual’s horoscope which determines
his or her specific powers. Even the relationships of
“attraction or repulsion” (amicitia vel lis)
between sublunary bodies correspond to the relationships between
celestial bodies. Agrippa insistently emphasizes the link connecting
magic to astrology, defining the latter as “the much-needed key
for all secrets”. In recognizing the pivotal role played by
astrology, Agrippa seems to contradict his harsh judgment of this
science in De vanitate: fallacious conjecture, practiced by
superstitious, ignorant, and mendacious followers. The contradiction
is only apparent, however. Like any other human science, astrology is
both bad and good. It is bad in the hands of those who pass off a
conjecture as an infallible fact, thus denying man’s freedom and
the divine providential design. It is good in the hands of the
Christian magus, who uses it to reveal that God shines everywhere and
to benefit his own kind. In the context of Agrippa’s purpose in
De occulta philosophia, good (that is, non-deterministic)
astrology remains the key to rebuilding true Christian magic.

Book III was most affected by Agrippa’s meticulous recasting of
the treatise. Through his contact with Latin kabbalistic texts (both,
translations from Hebrew literature as well as works by Christian
followers), Agrippa was able to insert many new chapters: on the
Sephiroth, that is, the ten attributes or emanations
surrounding the infinite; on the ten names of God; and on angels and
demons. His (second-hand) openness to the Hebrew tradition inspired a
more mature approach to a number of essential issues. In particular,
the topic that humanity is created “in the image of God”
became a more developed account of the human being as a “small
world” (microcosmus). Juxtaposing the original nucleus,
drawn from his own unfinished Dialogus de homine
(Dialogue on Humankind), with selected passages from the
doctrine of the Zohar, the most important kabbalistic work
(via Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi), Agrippa was able to
elaborate further his cherished doctrine of three parts of human soul.
Since soul’s three parts (neshama, ruah, and
nephesch in Hebrew) have different origins and natures, they
also have different destinies. After the body’s death, the
sensitive soul (nephesch, idolum) immediately
dissolves. Mind (neshama), as the breath of God, is immune
from sin and returns immediately to its abode, reuniting with its
origin. Reason (ruah), by contrast, must undergo judgment
with regard to the choices it has made in life: it will participate in
the beatific vision if it has followed the way of the mind; it will be
damned and reduced to the status of an evil demon if it has made
itself a slave of the sensitive soul. In this way, the topic of
humankind as created in the image of God assumed a more defined
eschatological meaning. In Agrippa’s view, the Pauline
“You are the temple of God” (I Corinthians 3:16) meant
recognizing the presence of God in each human being—the mind,
which characterizes the peculiar dignity of the microcosmus
in conformity with humankind’s privilege of being made in the
image of God. Interiority became the foundation of the intellectual
and religious life. The cultural background of the magus must be
wide-ranging, but his claim to perfection is to be founded on his
self-consciousness.

The path to attaining wisdom requires moral and intellectual training
(dignificatio). Firstly, “natural” perfection
(dignitas) is needed, that is, the perfect physical and
mental disposition granted by a favorable horoscope (the same which
Jesus Christ had). Avicenna’s doctrine of the “perfect
human being” (homo perfectus), the prophet, is
recognizable here. According to Agrippa, however, those who were not
born under this favorable constellation can replace the natural
dignitas which they lack with an “artificial”
one, using selected foodstuffs, natural remedies, and a proper
lifestyle. The second requirement is the “merit”
(dignitas meritoria), that is, the overcoming of corporeal
passions and sensitive impressions, the recovery of knowledge, and the
mastery of everything: when reason subjects itself to mind,
man’s soul becomes a “soul standing and not falling”
(anima stans et non cadens) and is able to perform miracles
“by God’s virtue” (in virtute Dei). The
third requirement is “godliness” (ars religiosa),
that is, the constant and pious practicing of sacred ceremonies, which
are metaphors and perceptible signs of the transformation worked by
God in us. This does not mean the requirement to carry out initiatory
rituals in order to gain access to esoteric and supra-rational
mysteries. Agrippa’s appeal to spiritual purification was
essential precisely because his book made known to everyone the
‘secrets’ of magic. Only a person who is “perfectly
pious and truly religious”, however, can legitimately perform
‘true’ and ‘pure’ magic. This is why spiritual
rebirth (and, hence, magic) is not available to everyone: the divine
spark which is naturally present in each individual is completely
inactive in the majority of humankind, whose reason is overwhelmed by
the impulses of their senses.

Agrippa’s overall oeuvre may be regarded as an
uninterrupted meditation on humanity: the meaning of its existence,
its possibility of gaining not only eternal bliss, but also happiness
on earth. From this point of view, Agrippa may be considered as a
“humanist theologian” (Van der Poel 1997). Nonetheless, he
proposed a radical revision of the very idea of theology. It should
not be a “subalternating” or higher “science”,
placed at the end of a long and complex training, as medieval
scholastics had done. Instead, theology must be an isagogic, or
introductory, knowledge, since its task was to guide Christian people
in their moral improvement, as well as in their earthly well-being.
Agrippa’s theology, more than a philosophical treatment of God,
was, above all, a serious reflection on humankind, with the goal of
leading it to self-consciousness and, then, making it fully aware of
its origin and its final end. Ultimately, Agrippa may be better
defined as a “civic theologian”. The specific intentions
of his works, their literary genres, and the personal background to
their composition are all very different, which to some extent may
explain certain inconsistencies between them. Nevertheless, despite
every apparent contradiction and ambiguity presented by an impetuous,
polemical, and very often foolhardy personality such as Agrippa, he
always assessed human knowledge (including magic) with respect to its
awareness of the relationship which binds man to God. The way to truth
lies not in the rifts between different schools of thought or in
philosophical distinctions, but in self-knowledge and
self-awareness.

Nogarola, Isotta, Dialogue on Equal or Inequal Sin of Adam and
Eve, in Complete Writings, edited and translated by
Margaret L. King and Diana Robin, Chicago and London: Chicago
University Press, 2003, pp. 145–58.

Celenza, Christopher S., 2001, “The Search for Ancient
Wisdom in Early Modern Europe: Reuchlin and the Late Ancient Esoteric
Paradigm”, The Journal of Religious History, 25(2):
115–33. doi:10.1111/1467-9809.00124